Comment by kijin

I think it would depend on the language to a certain extent. For example, good luck writing anything complicated in Python without touching files and directories, because every file is a module and every directory is a namespace.

A programmer obviously can't be expected to know how everything works, which is why we have abstractions. But I think abstractions need to be leak-proof to a certain extent before you can justify not knowing what lies below. The current state of file system abstractions is nowhere near that. They leak all over the place.